Authors: John Grant
Strider's Galaxy (45 page)
There was stillness.
It was impossible for her to mimic the notes of the Spindrifter language using the various tonalities available to Argot, but, very slowly and deliberately, she did her best.
"Poll. Eee. Aaag. Ull."
Just above the static she could hear something that sounded halfway between a chirrup and a whisper. It didn't matter what the detail of the message was, as Polyaggle must have realized even as she spoke—because in a different sense the message had a very precise meaning.
Assuming their luck kept up, not just one but two of the species currently extant in The Wondervale had been saved by the Trok from possible extinction.
To hell with whether the Helgiolath got round to coining all those little medals: Strider was going to do it herself—with her bare teeth, if necessary.
#
From the outset Pinocchio had known that, whatever Strider might think, this was a venture from which he was not going to return; now that he was in virtual symbiosis with the Image, the knowledge was an integral part of his make-up. And Ten Per Cent Extra Free—or, rather, the part of the
Gestalt
that could be conceptually partitioned off as Ten Per Cent Extra Free—had conspired in keeping the truth from her. She might have done something foolish and typically human like countermand her earlier instructions to the bot. Pinocchio
could
disobey direct orders, especially if he believed that by doing so he was acting in Strider's best interests, whether she knew it or not—he wouldn't be down on Qitanefermeartha had that not been the case—but even then it was very difficult for him.
He watched, with Ten Per Cent Extra Free also watching through Pinocchio's photoreceptors, the ships of the little Trok fleet lift off one by one and then speed away overhead. From here even Pinocchio's acute vision could not make out anything more than the flares of the rockets. He wondered which of them bore Leonie—knowing her, it would be the last to leave. He felt something inside him which, after a millisecond's thought, he identified as sorrow. Farewell, Leonie. There was still that other of those things called emotions inside him—the one which as yet he had been unable to identify, though it had been increasingly affecting his behavior in minor ways for some time.
The main body of the Trok fighters lifted off now, much more quickly, and streaked towards the pole.
He/they waited a further two minutes.
Time,
he/they thought.
There is a limit to the accuracy with which a shuttle's course can be pre-programmed, especially a shuttle that is lifting itself from a slightly sloping, treacherously soft plain of dust: a tiny subsidence beneath it can throw all the calculations off by a crucial few meters. There is also a limit to the number of actions even an Image can manage to perform simultaneously.
Strider had imagined that the bot would be able to leave the shuttle before it flew on its final, deadly mission. In fact, his puter was required to assist the ship's own rudimentary puter make all the small adjustments that would be necessary during the flight. The Image would have been able to do this, of course, except for the fact that the Image was going to be otherwise employed.
I WILL REMAIN IN CONSTANT MENTAL CONTACT WITH YOU,
said the Ten Per Cent Extra Free fragment of the
Gestalt
,
BUT NOW I MUST RELOCATE TO THE INTERIOR OF THE CITY.
Pinocchio knew this, for the thought was in part his own. He nodded his head—a human reaction that had been written into his software. Perhaps it would be the last human reaction he would ever display. His inheritance.
He/they triggered the launching procedure, and rockets struggled to raise the vehicle off the plain. It weaved slightly as it ascended, and he/they reflexively made a trivial alteration to the program. The dust roiled beneath the shuttle. The stars were very bright—they seemed brighter even than Qitanefermeartha's dim red sun, which was lying just above the horizon. All were outshone by the occasional brief flares of destruction still continuing above him/them. The Autarchy's defenders were putting up a better fight than expected.
He/they primed every ballistic on the shuttle—every weapon down to the last spare lazgun—and then programmed the drive for auto-destruct. Finally he/they set the shuttle into full forward thrust, with an acceleration of over ten gees.
Low across the plain it sped as straight as a laser beam towards the city's gloomy deadmetal airlock doors.
The Ten Per Cent Extra Free part of the symbiosis drew back from The Truthfulness some of the energy he had earlier stolen from the city.
All seventeen of the airlocks suddenly opened just as the shuttle approached. Pinocchio hardly had time to register them as the shuttle, streaming vengeful fire, shot straight through them. They closed tidily behind it as swiftly as they had opened.
Beyond, further—less substantial—barriers awaited. They shattered under the colossal impact of the howling spacecraft. Even Pinocchio's night-vision could see nothing now—the plastite forescreen was completely obscured by debris. The
Gestalt
of himself and Ten Per Cent Extra Free had started to use senses that, mixing machine and Image perceptions, were utterly alien to the human experiential world. Nano-trickles of electrical current within Pinocchio's and the shuttle's puters interrelated with equally tiny pulses of trans-reality energy as the vessel plowed through the flimsy walls and other structures of Qitanefermeartha, leaving thousands of dead and dying in the darkness of their wake.
The bot made a few more minuscule alterations. The impacts kept inducing trivial deviations into the shuttle's trajectory. 2.339081 seconds to go. 2.339080. 2.339079 . . .
Pinocchio made a guess at the emotion his software had serendipitously developed towards Leonie.
Ten Per Cent Extra Free drew power from The Truthfulness, expanding his being until it contained almost as much energy as he had originally taken from the city.
And then he returned it to Qitanefermeartha's main power-generating station, a vast installation right at the hub of the city.
Priming it.
Everywhere—even in the tunnel where the Autarch Nalla struggled and cursed—the lights came on.
That was of only passing interest to Qitanefermeartha's citizens, however, because just under a quarter of a second later the powerful ballistic that the shuttle had become struck the very center of the unstable bomb that the power-generating station had become.
A dome of deadmetal not only keeps things out: it keeps things
in
. There was nowhere for the fireball to go.
"At last, I've become a Real Boy," thought Pinocchio in the instant that he, the shuttle, the central power-generating station and everything else for a hundred kilometers around were vaporized.
It took a little longer for the entire interior of the city to be sterilized.
Oh,
several
seconds.
6
Losses, Gains, Reload and Aim
From where Strider was sitting she could see the disc of Qitanefermeartha. She felt as if the planet should show some sign of the premeditated act of mass murder she had perpetrated upon it. Necessary murder, perhaps, but it seemed to her like murder nevertheless.
She shifted in her seat. Once they were safe at the pole—although two people had failed to make it—Segrill had communicated with his Bredai allies, and within the hour a Bredai shuttle had arrived to lift them off-planet: it had been about the size of the
Santa Maria
. By that time five of the humans had died of asphyxiation, and several others had required urgent treatment. Fortunately the air aboard both the shuttle and the mother ship to which they were boosted approximated to F-14's atmosphere, so with luck it didn't contain anything toxic. Even so, everyone was now following Polyaggle's example and as a precaution refusing to eat anything but textured vegetable protein; there was anyway little temptation to eat whatever it was that the vast, clumsy-seeming Bredai enthusiastically consumed in room-sized quantities.
There had been so many losses, mused Strider, aside from among her own personnel. The Helgiolath fleet had been reduced by over one-half, Kortland himself seemingly being among the casualties. Several of Segrill's fighters had simply vanished: just because the Trok were small didn't mean that their personal griefs were small. A few of Qitanefermeartha's defenders had fled into the wilds of The Wondervale, but the remainder had been destroyed in their entirety. The Autarchy had lost its Autarch, and its capital.
Everybody had lost something, it seemed.
She was annoyed with herself that only one loss seemed to count very much to her.
Pinocchio.
Lover, trusted friend, confidant, advisor. The person to whom she could confess her most intimate secrets, her most neurotic worries. The one member of her personnel whom she hadn't had to be captain of. The rock to which, in times of need, she could cling.
Bredai decontamination had made the Spindrifter version look positively subtle. Not only was Strider entirely hairless, she felt as if every follicle had been individually scoured out, and none too gently. The Bredai didn't have too much use for fabric, and so like everyone else she was naked—Umbel knew what they were going to do next time they needed to suit up. It was curiously reassuring that her physical nakedness matched her nakedness of spirit.
Pinocchio.
Which idiot back at the SSIA had thought to give the bot such an infantile, patronizing name? Again and again Pinocchio had proved himself to be at least the equal and usually the superior of the humans around him. She wished whoever it had been were in front of her, so that she could . . .
And then, as her blood cooled, she thought about the name a little further.
No, after all, the name had been perfectly apposite.
Odd how long it had taken her to realize that fact.
#
Danny O'Sondheim, leaning into the Pocket, felt as if the wormhole were actively pulling at him. He realized there was sweat on his forehead, but resisted the urge to wipe it away: to do so he would have had to pass his hand through the small green knot that the Images had created for him in the center of the Pocket.
Dammit, but he missed the presence of Strider. Dammit, but at the same time he was glad she was gone: the
Santa Maria
was his. People didn't enlist in the SSIA to become seconds-in-command.
There was a strange taste in his mouth. He at last identified it as lime. That was the taste of the wormhole.
He pressed the button that the graphic display told him to press so that the tachyonic drive would cut in. He found himself grinning just before he pressed it. The drive itself was going to revolutionize humanity's physics. The ride back through the wormhole was going to be an exhilaration.
In point of fact, O'Sondheim first realized the
Santa Maria
had entered the wormhole when he found himself staring into a blackly cavernous maw, framed above and below by arrays of mauve and seemingly very sharp teeth. That the upper and lower jaws were currently several hundred kilometers apart did not reassure him at all.
It's all just an illusion,
was his first thought.
Oh shit,
was his second.
#
Quite a lot had been gained, thought Lan Yi as he stroked the skin of his forearm, amazed yet again by its silky smoothness. Although the experience of decontamination itself had been unpleasant, he was captivated by the various sensations of its after-effects.
The destruction of the Autarch and of Qitanefermeartha was a first step towards, he hoped, The Wondervale's gaining some form of freedom as it struggled out from under the tyrant's boot. Of course, there would be another Autarch soon—as soon as various competing would-be heirs battled out the succession, wiping out a few worlds and species along the way. But the early days of a new tyranny are the time when it is at its most vulnerable: there was hope.
Alliances, too, were gains.
There was the alliance now of the humans with the Trok and the Bredai and the various other species who had thrown off the thraldom to which they had been subjected on F-14. The Helgiolath, the Onurg of the Pridehouse had explained, were not necessarily to be trusted for ever, but perhaps they could be trusted for now. And then there was the forthcoming alliance with the ancient species, something which Lan Yi eagerly anticipated. He still wanted to study Polyaggle, to find out how such a highly sophisticated colonial organism—if that was what she was—could have evolved. The prospect of discovering other, equally strange species stirred more than just his intellect. He was honest enough with himself to recognize that there was an emotional charge there as well. The appeal of scientific research can be described as the satisfaction of human inquisitiveness—which is a long phrase meaning "the thrill."
And there had also been a personal gain.
Lan Yi walked across the floor of the sparsely furnished common-room the Bredai had created for the humans and took Strauss-Giolitto's hand. She reached her head down towards him and they pecked each other chastely on the cheek. At some time or another as they'd separately careened over the barren plains of Qitanefermeartha they'd individually realized quite how much they meant to each other. Older brother, younger sister; big sister, little brother.
There were tears in Strauss-Giolitto's eyes.
"Shit," she said, "but I've been thinking about that damn' bot again."
#
It was several subjective days later when Strider felt the nudge of an Image into her mind. The probe seemed slightly clumsy and nervous, as if this were some kind of tyro. Was there such a thing as a newborn Image? She had come to the assumption that the beings were immortals.
LEONIE,
said an unpracticed voice.
Pinocchio's voice.
